Zimiamvia: A Trilogy Read online

  Zimiamvia: A Trilogy

  by

  E.R. Eddison

  BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK

  Contents

  Mistress of Mistresses - Book I

  The Overture

  Principal Persons

  I

  A Spring Night in Mornagay

  II

  The Duke of Zayana

  III

  The Tables Set in Meszrza

  IV

  Zimiamvian Dawn

  V

  The Vicar of Rerek

  VI

  Lord Lessingham’s Embassage

  VII

  A Night-Piece on Ambremerine

  VIII

  Sferra Cavallo

  IX

  The Ings of Lorkan

  X

  The Concordat of Ilkis

  XI

  Gabriel Flores

  XII

  Noble Kinsfnen in Laimak

  XIII

  Queen Antiope

  XIV

  Dorian Mode: Full Close

  XV

  Rialmar Vindemiatrix

  XVI

  The Vicar and Barganax

  XVII

  The Ride to Kutarmish

  XVIII

  Rialmar in Starlight

  XIX

  Lightning Out of Fingiswold

  XX

  Thunder Over Rerek

  XXI

  Enn Freki Renna

  XXII

  Zimiamvian Night

  A Fish Dinner in Memison - Book II

  Introduction

  A Letter of Introduction

  Principal Persons

  I

  Aphrodite in Verona

  II

  Memison: King Mezentius

  III

  A Match and Some Lookers on

  IV

  Lady Mary Scarnside

  V

  Queen of Hearts and Queen of Spades

  VI

  Castanets 'Betwixt the Worlds

  VII

  Seven Against the King

  VIII

  Lady Mary Lessingham

  IX

  Ninfea di Nerezza

  X

  The lieutenant of Reisma

  XI

  Night—Piece: Appassionato

  XII

  Salute to Morning

  XIII

  Short Circuit

  XIV

  The Fish Dinner: Praeludium

  XV

  The Fish Dinner: Symposium

  XVI

  The Fish Dinner:Caviar

  XVII

  In What a Shadow

  XVIII

  Deep Pit of Darkness

  XIX

  Ten Tears: Ten Million Years: Ten Minutes

  Mezentian Gate - Book III

  PREFATORY NOTE

  Letter of Introduction

  Praeludium. Lessingham on the Raftsund

  Book I: Foundations

  1 - Foundations in Rerek

  2 - Foundations in Fingiswold

  3 - Nigra Sylva where the Devils Dance

  4 - The Bolted Doors

  5 - Princess Marescia

  6 - Prospect North from Argyanna

  Book II Uprising of King Mezentius

  7 - Zeus Terpsikeraunos

  Argument with Dates

  King Mezentius grows to manhood-Queen Rosma-Tragedy of Aktor. (Chapters 8-12)

  8 - The Prince Protector

  9 - Lady Rosma in Acrozayana

  10 - Stirring of the Eumenides

  11 - Commodity of Nephews

  12 - Another Fair Moonshiny Night

  Book III: The Affair of Rerek

  Argument with Dates

  Emmius Parry continues his policy, looking north-The King gains (Chapters 13-14)

  13 - The Devil's Quilted Anvil

  14 - Lord Emmius Parry

  Book IV: The Affair of Meszria

  Argument with Dates

  The King gains Meszria - Amalie - Rosma in Rialmar (Chapters 15-19)

  15 - Queen Rosma

  16 - Lady of Presence

  17 - Akkama brought into Dowry

  18 - The She-Wolf tamed to Hand

  19 - The Duchess of Memison

  Book V: The Triple Kingdom

  Argument with Dates

  Beltran returns-Birth of Fiorinda-End of Geleron Parry-Barganax and Styllis: Barganax and Heterasmene: Barganax made Dux of Zayana-Prince Valero (Chapters 20-24)

  20 - Dura Papilla Lupae

  21 - Anguring Combust

  22 - Pax Mezentiana

  23 - The Two Dukes

  24 - Prince Valero

  Argument with Dates

  The King and the Duchess of Memison visit Queen Stateira: Lessingham and Lady M.dry-Lessingham-Rebellion in the Marches-Overthrow of A\amd (Chapters 25-27)

  25 - Lornra Zombremar

  26 - Rebellion in the Marches

  27 - Third War with Akkama

  Book VI: La Rose Noire

  28 - Anadyomene

  29 - Astarte

  Argument with Dates

  Barganax and Fiorinda-The King and the Vicar (Chapters 30-33)

  30 - Laughter-loving Aphrodite

  31 - The Beast of Laimak

  32 - Then, gentle cheater

  33 - Aphrodite Helikoble Pharos

  Note on Transition to Chapter 34 (see page 185) and on Chapter 35 as yet unwritten

  Book VII: To Know or Not to Know

  34 - The Fish Dinner: First Digestion

  35 - Diet a Cause

  36 - Rosa Mundorum

  37 - Testament of Energeia

  38 - Call of the Night-Raven

  39 - Omega and Alpha in Sestola

  Mistress of Mistresses

  E.R. Eddison

  BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK

  "From whatever heaven Mr. Eddison comes, he has added a masterpiece to English literature.'

  —James Stephens

  The author of this extraordinary and reverberating book has dared to be completely imaginative, to brush aside the world, create and order his own cosmqs, and with this background give us the death and transfiguration of a hero.

  The scene is that fabled land of Zimiamvia (already mentioned in the previous volume, The Worm Ouroboros) of which philosophers tell us that no mortal foot may tread it, but that souls do inhabit it of the dead that were great upon earth...Here they forever live, love, do battle, and even for a space die again.

  Lessingham—artist, poet, king of men, and lover of women—is dead. But from Aphrodite herself, Mistress of Mistresses, he has earned the promise both to live again in Zimiamvia and of her own perilous future favors.

  This volume recounts the story of his first day in that strange Valhalla, where a lifetime is a day and where— among enemies, enchantments, guile, and triumph—that promise is fulfilled.

  W.G.E

  TO YOU, MADONNA MIA AND TO MY FRIEND EDWARD ABBE NILES

  I DEDICATE THIS VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA

  Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des mattresses,

  O toi, tous mes plaisrs! o toi, tous mes devoirs!

  Tu te rappelleras la beaute des caresses,

  La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,

  Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des maitresses!

  Les soirs illumines par l’ardeur du charbon,

  Et les soirs au balcon, voiles de vapeurs roses.

  Que ton sein m'etait doux! que ton cceur m'etait bon!

  Nous avons dit souvent d'imperissables choses

  Les soirs illumines par l'ardeur du charbon.

  Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirees!

  Que l'espace est profond! que le cceur est puissant!

  En me penchant vers toi, reine
des adorees,

  Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang.

  Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soiries!

  La nuit s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison,

  Et mes yeux dans le noir devinaient tes prunelles,

  Et je buvais ton souffle, O douceur, O poison!

  Et tes pieds s'endormaient dans mes mains fraternelles.

  La nuit s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison.

  Je sais l’art d'evoquer les minutes heureuses,

  Et revis mon passe blotti dans tes genoux.

  Car a quoi bon chercher tes beautes langoureuses

  Ailleurs qu'en ton cher corps et qu'en ton cceur si doux?

  Je sais I'art d'evoquer les minutes heureuses!

  Ces serments, ces parjums, ces baisers infinis,

  Renaitront-ils d'un gouffre interdit a nos sondes,

  Comme montent au del les soleils rajeunis

  Apres s'etre laves au fond des mers profondes? —

  O serments! O parfums! O baisers infinis!

  BAUDELAIRE

  The Overture

  THE UNSETTING SUNSET AN UNKNOWN LADY BESIDE THE BIER EASTER AT MARDALE GREEN LESSINGHAM LADY MARY LESSINGHAM MEDITATION OF MORTALITY APHRODITE OURANIA A VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA A PROMISE.

  LET me gather my thoughts a little, sitting here alone with you for the last time, in this high western window of your castle that you built so many years ago, to overhang like a sea eagle's eyrie the grey-walled waters of your Raftsund. We are fortunate, that this should have come about in the season of high summer, rather than on some troll-ridden night in the Arctic winter. At least, I am fortunate. For there is peace in these Arctic July nights, where the long sunset scarcely stoops beneath the horizon to kiss awake the long dawn. And on me, sitting in the deep embrasure upon your cushions of cloth of gold and your rugs of Samarkand that break the chill of the granite, something sheds peace, as those great sulphur-coloured lilies in your Ming vase shed their scent on the air. Peace; and power; indoors and out: the peace of the glassy surface of the sound with its strange midnight glory as of pale molten latoun or orichalc; and the peace of the waning moon unnaturally risen, large and pink-coloured, in the midst of the confused region betwixt sunset and sunrise, above the low slate-hued cloud-bank that fills the narrows far up the sound a little east of north, where the Trangstrommen runs deep and still between mountain and shadowing mountain. That for power: and the Troldtinder, rearing their bare cliffs sheer from the further brink; and, away to the left of them, like pictures I have seen of your Ushba in the Caucasus, the tremendous two-eared Rulten, lifted up against the afterglow above a score of lesser spires and bastions: Rulten, that kept you and me hard at work for nineteen hours, climbing his paltry three thousand feet. Lord! and that was twenty-five years ago, when you were about the age I am to-day, an old man, by common reckoning; yet it taxed not me only in my prime but your own Swiss guides, to keep pace with you. The mountains; the un-plumbed deeps of the Raftsund and its swinging tideways; the unearthly darkless Arctic summer night; and indoors, under the mingling of natural and artificial lights, of sunset and the windy candlelight of your seven-branched candlesticks of gold, the peace and the power of your face.

  Your great Italian clock measures the silence with its ticking: 'Another, gone! another, gone! another, gone!1 Commonly, I have grown to hate such tickings, hideous to an old man as the grinning memento mori at the feast. But now, (perhaps the shock has deadened my feelings), I could almost cheat reason to believe there was in very truth eternity in these things: substance and everlasting life in what is more transient and unsubstantial than a mayfly, empirical, vainer than air, weak bubbles on the flux. You and your lordship here, I mean, and this castle of yours, more fantastic than Beckford's Fonthill, and all your life that has vanished into the irrevocable past: a kind of nothingness. 'Another, gone! another, gone!' Seconds, or years, or sons of unnumbered time, what does it matter? I can well think that this hour just past of my sitting here in this silent room is as long a time, or as short, as those twenty-five years that have gone by since you and I first, on a night like this, stared at Lofotveggen across thirty miles of sea, as we rounded the Landegode and steered north into the open Westfirth.

  I can see you now, if I shut my eyes; in memory I see you, staring at the Lynxfoot Wall: your kingdom to be, as I very well know you then resolved (and soon performed your resolve): that hundred miles of ridge and peak and precipice, of mountains of Alpine stature and seeming, but sunk to the neck in the Atlantic stream and so turned to islands of an unwonted fierceness, close set, so that seen from afar no breach appears nor sea-way betwixt them. So sharp cut was their outline that night, and so unimaginably nicked and jagged, against the rosy radiance to the north which was sunset and sunrise in one, that for the moment they seemed feigned mountains cut out of smoky crystal and set up against a painted sky. For a moment only; for there was the talking of the waves under our bows, and the wind in our faces, and, as time went by with still that unaltering scene before us, every now and again the flight and wild cry of a black-backed gull, to remind us that this was salt sea and open air and land ahead. And yet it was hard then to conceive that here was real land, with the common things of life and houses of men, under that bower of light where the mutations of night and day seemed to have been miraculously slowed down; as if nature had fallen entranced with her own beauty mirrored in that sheen of primrose light. Vividly, as it had been but a minute since instead of a quarter of a century, I see you standing beside me at the taffrail, with that light upon your lean and weather-beaten face, staring north with a proud, alert, and piercing look, the whole frame and posture of you alive with action and resolution and command. And I can hear the very accent of your voice in the only two things you said in all that four hours' crossing: first, The sea-board of Demonland.' Then, an hour later, I should think, very low and dream-like, This is the first sip of Eternity.'

  Your voice, that all these years, forty-eight years and a month or two, since first I knew you, has had power over me as has no other thing on earth, I think. And today— But why talk of to-day? Either to-day is not, or you are not: I am not very certain which. Yesterday certainly was yours, and those five and twenty years in which you, by your genius and your riches, made of these islands a brighter Hellas. But to-day: it is as well, perhaps, that you have nothing to do with to-day. The fourteenth of July to-morrow: the date when the ultimatum expires, which this new government at Oslo sent you; the date they mean to take back their sovereign rights over Lofoten in order to reintroduce modern methods into the fisheries. I know you were prepared to use force. It may come to that yet, for your subjects who have grown up in the islands under the conditions you made for them may not give up all without a stroke. But it could only have been a catastrophe. You had not the means here to do as you did thirty-five years ago, when you conquered Paraguay: you could never have held, with your few thousand men, this bunch of islands against an industrialized country like Norway. Stir's, 'Shall the earth-lice be my bane, the sons of Grim Kogur?' They would have bombed your castle from the air.

  And so, I think fate has been good to you. I am glad you died this morning.

  I must have been deep in my thoughts and memories when the Senorita came into the room, for I had heard no rustle or footfall. Now, however, I turned from my window-gazing to look again on the face of Lessingham where he lay in state, and I saw that she was standing there at his feet, looking where I looked, very quiet and still. She had not noticed me, or, if she had, made no account of my presence. My nerves must have been shaken by the events of the day more than I could before have believed possible: in no other way can I explain the trembling that came upon me as I watched her, and the sudden tears that half blinded my eyes. For though, no doubt, the feelings can play strange tricks in moments of crisis, and easily confound that nice order which breeding and the common proprieties impose even on our inward thoughts, it is yet notable that the perturbation that now swept my whol
e mind and body was without any single note or touch of those chords which can thrill so loudly at the approach of a woman of exquisite beauty and presumed accessibility. Tears of my own I had not experienced since my nursery days. Indeed, it is only by going back to nursery days that I can recall anything remotely comparable to the emotion with which I was at that moment rapt and held. And both then as a child, and now half-way down the sixties: then, as I listened on a summer's evening in the drawing-room to my eldest sister singing at the piano what I learned to know later as Schubert's Wohin?, and now, as I saw the Senorita Aspasia del Rio Amargo stand over my friend's death-bed, there was neither fear in the trembling that seized me and made my body all gooseflesh, nor was it tears of grief that started in my eyes. A moment before, it is true, my mind had been feeling its way through many darknesses, while the heaviness of a great unhappiness at long friendship gone like a blown-out candleflame clogged my thoughts. But now I was as if caught by the throat and held in a state of intense awareness: a state of mind that I can find no name for, unless to call it a state of complete purity, as of awaking suddenly in the morning of time and beholding the world new born.

  For a good many minutes, I think, I remained perfectly still, except for my quickened breathing and the shifting of my eyes from this part to that of the picture that was burning itself into my senses so that, I am very certain, all memories and images will fall off from me before this will suffer alteration or grow dim. Then, unsurprised as one hears in a dream, I heard a voice (that was my own voice) repeating softly that stanza in Swinburne's great lamentable Ballad of Death:

  By night there stood over against my bed

  Queen Venus with a hood striped gold and black,

  Both sides drawn fully back

  From brows wherein the sad blood failed of red,

  And temples drained of purple and full of death.

  Her curled hair had the wave of sea-water

  And the sea's gold in it.

  Her eyes were as a dove's that sickeneth.

  Strewn dust of gold she had shed over her,